Info
Particulars:
- None.
Forewarnings:
- Mentions of suicide;
- Mentions of blood and gore;
- Descriptions of dismemberment;
- Descriptions of death.
BOOK ON THE CALAMITOUS LORD OF STUPOR
COURTESY OF MASTER REGARYA
SCRIBED BY HIGH SCHOLARS OF THE LOST
All chapters, excluding the annotation of our Master Regarya, were writ in an archaic script and language used by our ancestors during and after the Slaughtering of the Lost Temple—known also as the Massacre in the Fifty-first Domain—on the First Year of the Pantheonic Calendar known as the First Year of Alpha. These manuscripts were written roughly eleven million years ago within the Lost Temple or City of the Fifty-first Domain and were translated with the combined efforts and capabilities of the Academia in the Study of the History and Literature of the Lost.
CHAPTERS
REVELATION OF AGALAN I
"ILIAD IN THE FIRST YEAR OF ALPHA, SPRING"
REVELATION OF NIMUEL
"ILIAD IN THE FIRST YEAR OF ALPHA, SUMMER"
INTERMISSION OF ORO
"SINS OF THE UNKINGLY Y'LIAD THE MALEVOLENT"
REVELATION OF AGALAN II
"ILIAD IN THE FIRST YEAR OF ALPHA, AUTUMN AND WINTER"
ANNOTATION OF REGARYA
"THE VANISHING OF THE GREYKING IN HISTORY"
REVELATION OF AGALAN I
Twilight of the Thirty-ninth Day of Spring, First Year of Alpha.
Our village was celebrating a good harvest that night, the elders had invited all of us to feast in the church, to thank the goddess of the harvest for the fertility in the land of our small village. Everyone was commemorating the honor of Protastheia with dances and songs and joy. The campfires outside the church painted the marble walls with warmth and laughter, the flickering of fires made it seem like they too were dancing alongside our people, and despite the impending cold night enshrouding our place, there was nothing warmer than the happiness in that church and its vicinities.
The children played their fun little games, threw sticks and stones, shouted and laughed, and hopped and jumped and leaped with the joyous innocence of youth. The women spoke of their days, chuckled at their little dramas, and shared small tales of their children and grandchildren. The men drank and danced and sang chants with celebratory vigor, some shared how their duties went, and how they saw gods while they tended to the crops that feed the village. The elderly watched over like guardians, with powerless physiques but with strong hearts and understanding minds still. And I was there amongst them, amongst the celebration of our village. All was calm. All was fine.
Moments passed as the last rays of sunlight slowly evanesced into the night. The moonrise of twain moons scattered and shone upon the lands its silver light. The embers of campfires flickered with uncertainty yet the lively commemoration continued regardless. The uneasiness of the night felt different and distant but the joyous cries and laughs of the village were almost prevalent.
Some were silent, some sang slower, and some children played no longer. Laughs became whispers, eyes replaced with doubt. They were staring at something; I looked at the church. Inside, I saw a tall man. A man whose shadowed visage bore no emotion and retained no life. Eyes of ghostly pearl, the skin of a white snake, his cloak of ash, and his sword of silver. His form was of uncertain familiarity, the suspicion of truly knowing who the man was; he was no man.
Then, there swept an unforeseen cessation. For a moment, everything had stopped. It was a pause from anything, from everything. A scream broke the cease and he was inside the church no longer but amongst us, where blood rained for the first time. Mutilated, lay a child on the ground, and his mother and his father and brothers and sisters pooled into the fire and fed blood to flame. Their eyes were husks, final gasps leaving their bloodied throats, bodies bent and twisted, deformed into absolute inhumanity. Their ribs were like jaws, sprung open to reveal the heart for him to relish in their flesh and make them his own.
Run, now. That is what I heard, from no man, but from myself. Yet he stood there unmoving, his eyes a lifeless pair of grey emptiness staring into blood-fed fires. He felt nothing. Unsatisfied. And he had neither joy nor disappointment in his slaughter. The blood staining his hands was worthless, and I felt his unfilled gaze come down upon me, and it was like looking into a murky sea.
I ran, and I cried terribly, and I heard the blood-gurgled screams around me, enshrouded me in its terror and gore. Some ran off into the treeline beyond, desperation born from the slaughtering and blood-spilling of the monster behind them. Their eyes were gouged, guts and blood spilling from their stomachs and flayed gullets. The children. The children were silenced from their weeping and shouted with hushed throats, pale they turned and slept in cold mud. The mothers and fathers retaliated in futility, limbs crushed yet still clawing their way from the iron-soaked soil to the grey man's ashy coat, cursing and shouting and crying with hoarse voices. Their tears were laced with crimson hatred, blood seeping from behind their eyes. They were as if undead clinging to death's robe, begging for anything, for life, for death, for their children, for their families lost in the bloodbath; these they asked unrelentingly to hear no voice from the towering pale silhouette. They meant naught but meat to sunder with his sword and flesh to make his own. The blood rain was unceasing until nothing but a few remained; a filthy dawn shone its burning light into bodies no longer human.
I hid—away from the sun, and from that monster—holding a severed, lifeless limb from somebody I knew nothing of. I wished to save a single soul, but that was no fantasy, everything had been as real as it always was. However, I wondered, of all people, why it was us, isolated from the temple. Why his massacre was certain to be there. Why he came down from his grey heavens above to smite us? And we knew of his name. That tarnished blade of his.
The UNKINGLY. The PUTRID. SWORD SAINT UNWORTHY. Y'LIAD ELYION. God from the Pantheon we serve. Whose form lieth in the stagnancy and stupor of all things living and not. He who we thought was an extraordinary swordmaster and a right-minded king was no more than a butcher to take flesh and turn them into mindless, deformed abominations. He was no true king, nor a god worthy of prayers, a saint unholy, tainted by the illusion of grace of the Pantheon.
After he had vanished from the vicinity of the village, those who had run off into the forest nearby came running like a herd, weeping at the sights of corpse-less blood pools. He had turned them into his filthy flesh, and they had become alive again with minds numb to everything, tortured evermore, for their screams and beseeches resonated in the empty wreck of our village as they amalgamated once more into a clean silver blade—silent of any sanguinary crime and heinous slaughter.
Sorrow was the dawn of the fortieth day of spring—grief the noon later—as we clean the thoroughfare reeking of mists of blood, evaporating from the sun's scorch. We have cleansed the streets from blood and crimson clouds, yet they still stain our hands as we reek of gore and death. All who stood in Stupor, as was his intent towards us, had now vanished from the village.
Although we were fortunate to have survived his bitter greyen steel, we wished to have rather died on that dreadful night, and thus, some gathered in their ruined abodes, rope in hand, and hanged themselves, but I remain to write of this tale and to send letters to the Temple and the domain entire. The world shall witness this sole treachery of the Pantheon, and of his name he carves himself a slaughterer in perpetuating history.
Continued in Chapter II - "Revelation of Nimuel"